Excerpt from Crossing the Horizon by Laurie Notaro, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE
CHRISTMAS EVE 1927

After the final plane check before her aircraft would take off, Frances Wilson Grayson, the niece of President Woodrow Wilson, addressed the crowd of reporters before her.

"All my life, Christmas has been the same," the stout and ruddy Grayson said. "The same friends, the same gifts that didn't mean anything. Telling people things you didn't mean. But this year will be different.

"All Lindbergh did was fly an airplane, and look at all the publicity he got," she announced. "We're finally going to fly the Atlantic. Ill be famous!"

She was determined that nothing could stop her from charging into her place in history. Not the weather, not the crew, and certainly not the other women who pined for the title that would be hers in a matter of hours.

She would be the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.

The first. The only.

It would not be the English heiress, Elsie Mackay; the idiotic Ruth Elder; or the taudry Mabel Boll. All of them wanted what she was just about to reach and take for herself. She was sure it would be hers.

 

CHAPTER ONE
SPRING 1924

Elsie Mackay, 1920.

Hang on, she told herself as she tightened her grip as much as she could, the wind screaming wildly in her ears. Her eyes were closed; she knew that she should not open them. She was a thousand feet in the air, but right now all she had to do was hang on. That's all, she said to herself again, this time her lips moving, her eyes squeezing tighter.

Just hang on.

Twenty minutes before, the Honourable Elsie Mackay had sped up to the airfield, parked her silver Rolls near the hangar, the dirt cloud of her arrival still lingering in the air. She opened the side door to let Chim, her affectionate tan and white Borzoi, out to run the field. Suited up and goggled for a run with Captain Herne, her flying instructor, she was anxious to get back up into the air. The splendor and alchemy was consuming, swallowing her whole every time she lifted off the ground, dashing through clouds and soaring far above the rest of those anchored below. She had been enchanted at the controls of an airplane, feeling charged and elated— something she had almost forgotten. It had been weeks since she'd been up.

Captain Herne, unflappable, rugged, and a veteran of the early days of aviation, emerged from the hangar with a smile and his leather flying helmet already on, the chin buckles swaying slightly as he walked toward her. He pointed upward. "She's ready if you're ready." He laughed, as if Elsie would have another answer.

She called Chim back, gave him a quick pet and a kiss, and followed Herne to the field where his biplane stood, ready for a jaunt down the runway, which was a short, clear path through a field of grass dotted with wildflowers. With the soles of her black leather spool-heeled oxfords on the wing, Elsie pulled herself up using the lift wires that crossed between the two wings and settled into the rear cockpit. They flew into the air within seconds, and Elsie breathed it in deeply and solidly. She smiled. She had an idea.

"Say, Hernie!" she shouted to him through the cockpit telephone when they had climbed to a distinguished altitude. "Loop her around the other way!"

The veteran flier knew that was a maneuver that meant bringing the plane to a loop with the wheels toward the inside, putting a terrific strain on the struts; the craft wasn't built to fly that way. But after a glance at his and her safety belts, Herne shook off his caution and shoved the nose of the machine down and turned her over.

Elsie laughed with delight; nearly upside down, she already knew that she was the only woman who had looped with the wheels inside the circle.

Excerpted from Crossing the Horizon by Laurie Notaro. Copyright © 2016 by Laurie Notaro. Excerpted by permission of Gallery Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.